A marketing campaign that people willingly pass on to other people like their friends and family is often referred to as ‘gone viral’ in that there is no stopping it.

A viral campaign is what marketers aspire to because it means getting other people to pass on their marketing message for them and for zero cost.

But creating a campaign that can go viral is not easy and may take many ‘misses’ before a successful one is done.

Follow these 5 tips and your chances of succeeding will be greatly increased.

Quality Matters: If you create top quality content it will get linked to time and again, people will refer to it as the authority place because it will make them seem slightly more authoritative. The more people like it, the more likely they are to link to it. Spinning and reformating PLR articles is not top quality content

Press Releases: Try and get in to the habit of syndicating a press release whenever you launch a new product or website. You never know, if your news is relevant it may get picked up by a media company.

Short Reports: This is one of the best methods of viral marketing in the Internet marketing arena. By creating short, focused reports full of data and analysis you are giving people high quality content. You then give people the opportunity to freely pass around these reports to their readers so that they can provide them with high quality content. The reports contain links back to your sites and affiliate links, almost guaranteeing more money to you.

Social Networking: With the meteoric rise in popularity of social networks there has never been a better time to get your message out there and get it read by tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and more are great places to go to get your content read.

Article Writing: Writing very high quality articles full of juicy facts and data and letting other people put that on their website with a link back to your site is one of the original forms of viral marketing, but just because it’s original doesn’t mean it’s lost any potency. Getting your articles on other people’s sites is still one of the best ways to virally promote your website.

However, if you get the product launch game plan wrong then your entire effort could be wasted because not enough people know about your product and you throw away all that time and effort.

Even if you already have a list, getting people to buy your new product is not as simple as just sending an email announcing the launch. To maximize the amount of money you make from your product launch, follow these simple tips:

Get a buzz going: You have to tread a very fine line between creating a buzz and over hyping something and annoying people. Be careful not to just spam your list you could end up with a list size of zero! Create a buzz and get people reading your emails be giving away sneak peaks and free information related to the product you plan to launch.

Hosting logistics: There’s nothing worse than laying all the ground work, launching your site and then getting a call from your hosting company complaining of too much traffic and being informed they had to pull your site. Talk to your web host well in advance and tell them that you are expecting a big spike in traffic and they will recommend a solution to handle it.

JV’s on Board: Leveraging the power of other people’s lists is the number one path to untold riches. By getting several JV’s (that’s Joint Ventures) on board can mean the difference between a product launch that takes in a few thousand and a product launch that rakes in 6 figures. JV’s are discussed in more detail in another article on this website

You want your message to go viral when you undertake a buzz marketing campaign, have a think about the email forwards you get from time to time, funny pictures or funny jokes, or if you have ever been on a website and liked it enough to email, tweet or IM someone else about it – well that’s what you want to aim for in buzz marketing.

Just creating something that gets passed around though is not always enough, it needs to have a clear message back to your website and promote your brand. Follow these three methods to leverage your buzz marketing campaign:

Use Social Media: This is nearly always overlooked by many Internet Marketers who tend to focus on email lists, PPC and search engines, but there are so many more people who can easily be targeted on places like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace to get the buzz going on a particular product. It is best achieved by joining already active groups in niches that your product is aimed at and starting to name drop (not spam) your product in the conversation.

Don’t Sell! This may sound counter intuitive, but the aim of buzz marketing is to get people talking about your product, not for you to sell your product. Sales pitches don’t make for good viral campaigns, people don’t like to mention sales pitches or think they are trying to be sold something so anything salesy is strictly off limits. You need to have a rapport and acceptance of the community before you begin to mention your product.

Be Consistent: As with so many marketing methods on the internet, you must be consistent when interacting with people and it’s got to be done in a natural way, simply updating all the conversations with single sentence replies is considered bad form, you need to dedicate time every day to really get involved with the conversation at hand, creating the buzz doesn’t happen overnight.

By now your own head should be ‘buzzing’ with new ideas about buzz marketing and strategies you can use to get people talking about your product simply by engaging and networking with them. The ultimate goal of course is to have people talking about your product without even mentioning it yourself!